Original artwork description:

I enjoy the loose uninhibited quality of drawing with a simple yellow Ticonderoga pencil on a smallish peice of paper. This feels as free as a sketchbook to me. The pencil I have always known and it feels so natural in my hand. In this work I am particularly interested in exploring the mark making similar to Van Gogh's landscape drawings in ink. I attempt to draw like Rafael and copy his drawings regularly.

This is a study and practice drawing for an oil painting composition in my 'Odalisque series'. In this body of work I am interested in the commonalities and the contrasts that compare the female figure to the coastal hills where I live. Similarities between the two are how the lines rhyme in ways that are a sublime invitation to the imagination, and how the fire adapted, San Francisco Bay Area landscape of renewal compares naturally to a Mother Nature figure. Differences that I think about are how the fragility of flesh contrasts starkly next to rocky volcanic land and sun parched vegetation of twisted manzanita, ticks and poison oak. I also notice our ephemeral inevitability. She is poised next to the old-as-the-hills existential element of time.

Materials used:

Pencil

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